HD10: Empiricism, Psychohistory, Narratology: The horror! The horror!

Once Marlow reached the Inner Station, he found Kurtz, of course. Kurtz was weakened and gravely ill. He died on the trip back:

"One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, 'I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.' The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, 'Oh, nonsense!' and stood over him as if transfixed.

"Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—

"'The horror! The horror!'

At the very end of the story, when Marlow is talking with Kurtz’s fiancée, known only as “the Intended,” she insists on knowing the last thing he said. He tells her that it was her name, which is, of course, a lie. But as Johanna M. Smith* points out in a feminist reading of the text, things are not so simple:

And surely the particular lie Marlow chooses is meant to satisfy his “dull anger” with the Intended’s naïveté and her insistence that he give her something “to live with.” He and his audience—and the reader—know that by substituting the Intended’s name for “the horror! the horror” he equates the two; her ignorance of this equation becomes a punishing humiliation.

I believe that she is correct in this matter. And that opens up three lines of inquiry which I’d like to sketch out: 1) empirical, 2) psychohistory, and 3) narratology.

Empirical

The empirical issue is whether or not readers do see the equation between “the horror! the horror!” and the name of the unnamed fiancée. What readers DO see obviously is the lie, that Marlow did not tell the Intended what Kurtz actually said. But how do they experience that equation, which is, I believe, the second one in the book (I’ll talk about the first one a bit later)?

One could, of course, ask them: Do you think that Conrad is equating the Intended and the horror at the end of Heart of Darkness? I have no idea how people would answer, though I assume that some would simply reply that, of course he isn’t doing that, it’s a lie. Such a conscious reply, however, is entirely consistent with the reader having ‘gotten’ the point of Conrad’s equation. On the other hand, others might reply that, yes, that’s what he’s doing. But does that reflect their experience or are they simply responding as they believe the question prompts them to respond?

This IS an empirical issue, but it’s by no means obvious to me how it can be investigated empirically.

Psychohistory

The word “psychohistory” is in use in at least two senses, one for an imaginary discipline in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, and the other for a real discipline associated with Lloyd deMause, who is interested how a society’s child-rearing practices affect the entire life mode of that society. I’m not familiar with Asimov’s fictional discipline at all, but I know a bit of deMause’s, and what I have in mind is closer to that.

What I have in mind is the way Conrad has equated the dynamics of imperial conquest, Europe in the Congo, with the dynamics of male/female relations, which is what Smith’s essay is about. In that equation, women, at least construed in a certain way, are the horror, while the conquest of the Congo is rape, pursued collectively and by other means, to paraphrase von Clausewitz on war. What interests me is the possibility that this is not simply a matter of ideologies, imperialism and sexism, but of how 19th Century European societies actually worked.

My touchstone on this is an essay Talcott Parsons published in 1947 on “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World” (for more, see this post). Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

The conquest of Africa was certainly an economic activity. But it was also an imaginative one, a mythological and symbolic one. And the two are inextricably intertwined in the workings of the human psyche, both individually and collectively.

Narratology

Finally, narratology, the study of narrative as it has emerged out of Russian formalism and French structuralism, more or less. How did Conrad do it? How does Heart of Darkness work? We can see what he did in that final conversation between Marlow and the Intended, we can describe it:

1) She asked for his last words.

2) We know what those words were, and Marlow reminds us of this as he tells the tale of that final conversation.

3) Marlow does the deed, tells her a lie.

That’s what happened, but it doesn’t tell us very much. There’s something deeper going on. But what, and how does it work?

The answer to those questions, I fear, will stretch pretty long into the future as we attempt to gain a deeper understanding of language at large, language in whole texts, not sentence by sentence, and in detail, like one were describing the inner operations of one of those 19th century automata, elaborate electro-mechanical machines designed to act like humans.

Here I wish only to observe that, of course, the entire text, with its double narration and reduction of most people to mere roles (e.g. the Intended), is that machine and that to understand how that equation is made, finally, in the reader’s mind, we must understand the entire text, not just the concluding paragraphs. In particular, we must understand – you know it’s coming, don’t you? – the nexus. We must understand, first of all, that it is the structural center of the text, it is a set-piece within the story within the story.

And we must understand what happens within this nexus. It begins by explicitly excluding the Intended from consideration:

I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie," he began suddenly. "Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it—completely. They—the women, I mean—are out of it—should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, 'My Intended.'

And it ends by introducing an equation, the first in the text:

He won't be forgotten. Whatever he was, he was not common. He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honor; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking. No; I can't forget him, though I am not prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him.

This equation is between Kurtz, the one who can’t be forgotten, and the helmsman, the African who died. In fact, it may be that Marlow evaluates the dead helmsman more highly than he does Kurtz, for he is NOT “prepared to affirm” that Kurtz “was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him.”

What happens, now, if we take this equation and use it to make a substitution in that last conversation about Kurtz, a substitution that just possibly replaces the object of that conversation with one of greater value? Let us, in our minds, set Kurtz in that equation to equal the helmsman who died: Kurtz = the (dead) helmsman. In this substitution, it is African the Intended is talking about, it is the dead African to whom she is devoted.

So now we have it, one of the great horrors of the white imagination, from Othello and Desdemona through racial politics in America, but also Forster’s A Passage to India. And the rest of the non-white world.

Forget about that African woman Conrad so brazenly paraded before us as Kurtz’s mistress. Not so long after this tale was written that woman showed up on stages in Harlem and Paris where she attracted large followings. She is a real trope, a real figure in the racist imagination. But in this story she’s a distraction, a stunt to fool the eye. The real action is elsewhere, a black man and a white woman: The horror! The horror!

THAT, what I just did in the last few paragraphs, that’s something of a rhetorical trick, the sort of thing clever critics do. But I believe that something like that is, in fact, at work in Heart of Darkness, and that we’re going to need a new literary theory, constructed from the newer psychologies, in order to figure how it’s done. In detail.

* * * * *

* Johanna M. Smith, “Two Beautiful Altogether”: Ideologies of Gender and Desire in Heart of Darkness, in Ross C. Murfin, ed. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 189-204.